Or they are just seeing how well your pattern recognition and subsequent application of an efficient solution. The problem is our industry is full of people who

Or they are just seeing how well your pattern recognition and subsequent application of an efficient solution. The problem is our industry is full of people who put their whole self worth on intelligence and then pick learned skills to judge anyone too harshly that hasn't worked through algo and data structures. You miss alot of smart and great engineers who don't have that skill set. But for hiring, its about reducing false positives. So you might as well ignore those who dont atleast have that algo/ds toolkit.